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February Orlando PASS Meeting

Jack Corbett (@unclebiguns) and Andy Warren(@sqlAndy) invited me to speak at this month’s Orlando PASS meeting. First, I want to thank them for the opportunity. I enjoyed it.

For the benefit of those who couldn’t make the trip to Tampa last month for SQL Saturday #32, I did my talk on “Database Hardening via PowerShell”.

I worked a half day and then headed to Orlando around 12:30 PM.  The plan was to speak and to visit my daughters at the University of Central Florida.
I visited with the youngest daughter prior to the meeting.  When I asked if she was available, she asked “Does this mean I get a free lunch?”.  Yes, we had a late lunch
.
After lunch, I headed over to  the meeting location around 4 PM hoping to beat the rush hour traffic. Boy, was I wrong.  The constant rain that day slowed I-4 Eastbound traffic to a crawl.  Plus, I was wondering who let all these people off work early???

I arrived at the meeting location at 5 PM, a full hour before the meeting started.
I’m glad because it took the full hour to get ready and sort out the LiveMeeting setup.  It was the first time I had done a LiveMeeting.
Even with the hour prep time, I forgot to do one thing to prep for my demos.  Did you catch it?
I forgot to import the SQLPSX 2.0 modules prior to starting the first demo.

I should have run the following in the PowerShell IDE prior to starting:
import-module ShowMbrs
import-module SQLServer
import module Agent
import-module Repl
import-module SSIS
import-module SQLParser
I was able to recover pretty quickly because I had a version of the script that didn’t use the SQLPSX modules.

My demos demonstrated:
- How to check the SQL Server version on 600 servers in less than 10 minutes. 
- How to check which Windows groups have access to your database servers.
- How to check for the correct Recovery Model on multiple servers.
- How to list the sysadmins and database owners on multiple servers.
- A script to report on issues raised by our internal Compliance and Audit departments.

If any of this is of interest to you, I’ve provided my deck and scripts to OPASS to share.

As I said, I enjoyed the meeting. Andy and Jack do a great job getting people involved and talking to each other.  The icebreakers were effective and the attendees were friendly and attentive.
As usual, I always learn something new when I speak.  On this occasion, it was attending LiveMeeting as a speaker.  I also appreciated the feedback afterwards of my talk via blogs, Twitter, and e-mail regarding my performance.

After the meeting, I visited my other daughter and made it home to Tampa around Midnight.
It was a fun day.

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